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“ ‘Absolute chaotic disaster’ ”
Those are the words former President Barack Obama used to describe President Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, according to a leaked recording obtained by Yahoo News.
“It would have been bad even with the best of governments,” Obama, while making a push for Joe Biden, told some 3,000 ex-members of his administration in a call on Friday. “It has been an absolute chaotic disaster when that mindset — of ‘what’s in it for me’ and ‘to heck with everybody else’ — when that mindset is operationalized in our government.”
Trump has consistently boasted of his response to the virus, particularly how travel restrictions from China and Europe along with social distancing guidelines have “saved millions of lives.”
But Obama said the response has been “anemic and spotty,” Yahoo News reported.
“What we’re fighting against is these long-term trends in which being selfish, being tribal, being divided, and seeing others as an enemy — that has become a stronger impulse in American life. And by the way, we’re seeing that internationally as well,” Obama explained.
Trump took to Twitter TWTR, +4.03% to respond:
White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow also took exception to the criticism.
“With all due respect to the former president, and I really don’t want to get into a political back and forth here. I just — I don’t know what he’s talking about,” Kudlow said in an interview Sunday on “This Week” on ABC. “Look, what we’ve done may not be 100% perfect. You know, these things happen once every 100 years. But the overall picture is we’ve created a massive health and safety infrastructure to deal with the pandemic here in the United States.”
White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany, in a statement to Reuters, said Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic “has been unprecedented” and saved lives.
“While Democrats were pursuing a sham witch hunt against President Trump, President Trump was shutting down travel from China,” she said. “While Democrats encouraged mass gatherings, President Trump was deploying PPE, ventilators, and testing across the country.”
At last check, more than 1.3 million cases of COVID-19 have been confirmed in the U.S., along with 78,855 deaths, according to the latest figures from Johns Hopkins University.
